Five in Mind part two

Now that there’s little to do but tend to a baby, my reading habits have only altered in so far as there’s a little less Egyptian Book of the Dead, and a little more reading-for-potential-hand-me-down-must-reads. Although I’m sure there must be someone out there who counts those things as utterly compatible.

Potential candidates that I’ve been re-reading for suitability include:

1. The Virgin Suicides. Not only full of superbly named characters (Lux Lisbon, Trip Fontaine), it’s an immaculately crafted love-letter to loss, adolescence and lovely girls. And it made me sing Carol King songs for weeks afterwards.

   

2. Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner. Yet another beautiful woman turned crackers by the world that wants her. Plus, what an amazing description of Clark Gable: "He was an uncomplicated man with a vast natural charisma that he never sought to analyze; he drank himself to sleep, got to work on time, and never took himself too seriously … he was relaxed, reassuring, funny … Gable was a dignified man who worked in the spirit of comradely professionalism." Swoon.

3. Speaking of Gable, Gone with the Wind is a book that’s also always charming. Whilst the same can’t be said for the recent musical version (Why, Nunn, why? And P.S – you might want to try having the singers audible over the orchestra. Although …), the novel displays the mighty art of creating the perfect antihero, even if the heroine is fairly flawed (and summed up by one reviewer: "her journey is essentially spoilt brat to hard bitch" ). Rhett Butler, we salute you.

4. A cheat here: all of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. If only because I’ve managed to swiz my way through literary quizzes with his lovely in-jokes, and I feel I should pass this on to the next generation. I mean, who’s ever really going to be bothered to actually read Jane Eyre? Joke.

 

5. Continuing the theme of literary heroines, Rebecca scores highly in the hand-me-down charts, and not only because I seem to have no less than four copies on my shelves. Gothic, dramatic, without a single word wasted, it’s a book that feels at the heart of modern culture, whether it’s Fforde, Hitchcock, or Mitchell & Webb.

I join the hand-wringers in lamenting our five-book limit. If I’d been handing-down to a son, I would have had to switch this lot for such hero-heavy titles as Kalush and Sloman’s biography of Houdini (remarkable for the Spiritualists’ resemblance to the homeopaths of today), Charles Fleming’s biography of Don Simpson  (for how to do it in style if you’re going to do it at all), High Fidelity (hilarious), Lolita  (immaculate), and Watchmen (just. Really. Good.). But five it is, so five I shall stick to. *cough*

Sam the Copywriter

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Five in Mind part one

So you know what Penguin publishes – but what do Penguins read when they’re not at work?

Five in Mind will tell you. Over the next few months a collection of willing victims Penguins will write posts about five books that matter to them. That’s it. They might be books they love or hate, which they picked up by accident and now can’t get out of their heads, or which loom unread on a high shelf like some kind of taunting and spiteful gargoyle. These are the books that play a part in our lives and we can’t forget them no matter how hard we try. Why five? Why not?

Take it away, Rob.

Just the five, eh. It’s incredibly difficult to pick my five favourite books of all time; not only do they change all the time but irrespective of the current favourites, there are always more than five, so I’m not going to do that. And neither am I going to choose five books that I simply enjoyed or admired or that stayed with me long after I read them – because there are even more of those. So, I thought I’d share the five that over the past few years I’ve relentlessly tried to push on others in the same manic way that certain people put their iPod earpiece into your lug at the slightest opportunity. Because they’re the kind of recommendations that I enjoy most. So, in no particular order, listen up:

1 – A Disaffection. James Kelman joined Penguin around the same time as I did. I like to pretend that the two are connected. He’s an incredible writer and this is an extraordinary book.

 

 

2 – The Crossing. It’s pathetic but some of us are feeling a bit put out that the world has discovered Cormac McCarthy post-Oprah and the Coen Brothers. We’ll get over it but I know that the image of the dying wolf in this, the middle book in his Border Trilogy, will stay with me forever.

 

3 – The Afterglow. Anthony Cartwright’s debut novel is set in and around the post-industrial West Midlands – the place I still call home even though I haven’t lived there for years. ‘Beautiful’ isn’t always the first adjective I reach for in describing the region so it’s a mark of Cartwright’s achievement that this book is just that – and more.

4 – Crime and Punishment. I know I know but it’s always been in the top five and I suspect it always will be. I went to St Petersburg last year and paid an enterprising guide to take me on the Raskolnikov murder walk – a fascinating and at times illegal tour that included breaking into the attic that apparently inspired Dostoyevsky’s vision of the ‘coffin’ his anti-hero lived in. The author’s former apartment is now home to the Dostoyevsky museum, where you can see his massive desk exactly as he left it and marvel at the actual spoon he ate with on a daily basis. It’s in a display case and labelled ‘The Dostoyevsky spoon’ for any scholars accidentally reading this. 

5 – Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. A mad, brilliant novel from a criminally underrated writer about a mad, brilliant cast of characters living in the Ozark Hills and trying to survive the best way they know how.

   

   

I’m really only allowed five, you say? So I can’t even mention Jonathan Trigell’s Boy A (a brilliant novel before it was great TV), The Damned United, Revolutionary Road, Shawnie by Ed Trewavas, or our very own Nicci Gerrard’s meditation on the Soham murders, or John Gray’s Straw Dogs? No? Ridiculous …

Rob Williams
Creative Director

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Storytelling2.0

Yesterday I was asking an American book blogger if, following a week spent hanging out with UK publishers, she could see any major differences between publishers in the US and those over here. "Yep," she said, "depression." In the US apparently, "morale is low" and there is a feeling that the publishing of fiction, in particular, is ailing. If the internet hasn’t won already, it is believed, major damage has been inflicted on non-web based forms of entertainment.

Previous posts here, here, here and here for example, have considered that while the internet might indeed be transforming the cultural landscape, it’s not yet time to roll over and die. Yes, the game is changing, but we still want to be players, still believe that there is a market for quality fiction, and still think that if you tell an interesting enough story, whatever the medium, it will be read.

Over the last 5 weeks nearly 150,000 people have read the digital fictions we’ve presented at We Tell Stories, and with the release of this week’s installment this incursion into web-based fiction is coming to an end. We’ve learnt lots of things along the way. We’ve discovered that our authors are interested in new challenges and have enjoyed writing outside their comfort zones. That game designers are as interested in strong narrative as
book editors. That there is an interest and an audience for new ways of telling stories. That we shouldn’t be frightened of the internet, but instead should critically examine the possibilities it presents to create new forms of narrative, new audiences and new opportunities for our authors and their work.

We Tell Stories has been a great project to work on, but the challenge now is to learn from and take forward some of the ideas that have been raised and use this platform to make further, bolder online incursions. Being a publisher is not just about selling and distributing books, it’s about selling and distributing stories and ideas, and these can take many forms.

As Mohsin Hamid writes, ‘There are always at least two ways to tell a story.’ The game is afoot…

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Freeing Stoke Newington

Last Wednesday I sat in the audience at the British Book Awards listening to Khaled Hosseini graciously accept his award for A Thousand Splendid Suns. Well, he sort of accepted it. What he actually said was that he’d accept it for now, in the hope that it wouldn’t be too long before many other Afghans were nominated for such prizes – and that his highest hope would be for one of those nominees to be a woman. That ceremony may still seem a long way off but one of the most active groups in trying to bring it about is International PEN. This weekend (including today) they held their inaugural festival of world literature, Free the Word!, across several London locations.

On Saturday I bumped into John Simmons of recent Penguin Blog fame at a conversation between Yang Lian and Tze Ming Mok at the South Bank Centre. Now let’s be honest, Saturday afternoon spent listening to a pair of Chinese poets talk about translation probably isn’t going to challenge Stamford Bridge in the mass spectacle stakes any time soon (although one of my motives for attending this particular event was that I wouldn’t have to follow Wolves’ fortunes at Bristol City as closely as I normally would, as the football season nears ‘the business end’) – but in fact, the occasion was both enlightening and truly entertaining (apparently a quantity as foreign at the Bridge this season as most of the players). 

If jailing writers was an Olympic sport China would win the overall gold, and both Yang Lian and Tze Ming Mok are currently in exile, in London and New Zealand respectively. Both cite Tiananmen Square as a turning point in their poetic and political lives. Saturday was not only the first time the pair had met, it was also the day they made public an experiment in translation they’d been running between them by email. First Yang Lian read his poem about his ‘manor’, Stoke Newington, initially in the original Chinese, then the English translation by New Zealand academic Jacob Edmond – and both were beautiful in different ways.  Then Tze Ming Mok read her English mistranslation of the same poem using her imperfect grasp of Chinese (a Chinese Diasporan, she uses that distance in her work and in her humour), before Yang Lian translated that mistranslation back into Chinese. To finish, Mr Edmond tried to make sense of it all, gave up, did his own thing and in so doing bore out Yang Lian’s assertion that in order to translate poetry, translators must themselves be poets. Confused yet? So was I, at least a little bit, but it really didn’t matter. I didn’t need to understand much of what I’d heard to remember how much I once loved reading and listening to poetry. It demands a slowing down and a quality of attention that for whatever reason, I find difficult to achieve these days. But like Colin on his recent course, Saturday reminded me that the investment is invariably worthwhile.

The experiment was a success and the discussion that followed fascinating. I believed Yang Lian when he said that the best way to read is to translate, because it requires you to ‘cut in to’ the language. He described translations of his poetry not as his own work but as trees growing from the same ground (understandable as apparently someone once turned his ‘peacock’ into a ‘squirrel’); despite the well publicised loss of ‘something’ in translation, both poets were keen to make the point that much is also gained. Like the poets’ experiment, like Tze Ming Mok’s ongoing battle with her language and like the festival itself, I left understanding that the attempt to connect is what really matters.

International PEN hopes to make the festival an annual event and I very much hope they succeed. Oh, and Wolves drew 0-0. I missed nothing.

Rob Williams
Creative Director

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‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

Not yet they aren’t. But one of the most famous opening lines in modern English literature seems to me a good place to start writing about where to begin when reissuing an old book.

A friend of mine over at HarperCollins – in fact the wise chap that employed me here at Penguin a few years ago – had to hire a new copywriter a while back. He was looking for a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff and came up with the rather neat idea of inviting all applicants to supply the current blurb of a book they were fond of together with an entirely new blurb of their own devising. They then had to explain why theirs was better.

Improving on what has gone before in publishing is usually not so difficult since jackets tend to stay on books for many years and by the time publishers get around to reissuing them they look rather tired if not plain antediluvian. Here’s an example, appropriately enough, from the Eighties:

 

The blurb on 1989’s Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t sound much like a novel at all:
Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, the Thought Police – George Orwell’s world-famous novel coined new and potent words of warning for us all. Alive with Swiftian wit and passion, it is one of the most brilliant satires on totalitarianism and the power-hungry ever written.

Maybe. But it sounds like a bit of a slog.

When it came to doing the reissue (out in July) it didn’t take a lot of head scratching for me to decide that a) it was time I re-read one of my favourite books and b) the starting point for writing this blurb had to be the excellent opening line, which manages to be perfectly ordinary until its very last word – which rips the rug out from under your feet. Nice work, George.

By listing some of the words that Nineteen Eighty-Four had added to the English language, the old blurb was trying to get across the book’s weight, its sheer importance. Unfortunately, as if with a lot of attempts to make things sound worthy, Nineteen Eighty-Four just comes across as dull. Something to be admired rather than liked.

I think we can do better than that.

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 …

This edition is not the Penguin Modern Classics edition. This edition is the one we want to get into the hands of school kids, to grab their short attention spans. So yes, putting the key words – Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, Ministry of Truth – in there is important, but that is no reason to leave the story or the characters out. The great thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it is so unsettling, it is so terrifying and bleak (and not much fun as satire, either). To get that across we need to know what’s at stake – what Big Brother is opposed to. We need Winston and Julia, their hopes and love, their humanity. Without Winston and Julia there is no tension, no story.

A book might be a classic, big names may rate it, teachers might tell you it is an essential read. But that’s no reason not to sell it as if it’s brand new – to some people it will be – or not to try to seduce the sceptical reader into turning to the first page despite themselves.

At the same time as Nineteen Eighty-Four we’re reissuing Animal Farm:

Both books feature stunning covers by Shepard Fairey – if you’re going to grab people, get them by the short and curlies. But don’t let either cover art or blurbs distract you from the words within.

Any lazy or awful blurbs on good books you’d like to share with us? And can you do any better?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

Nineteen Eighty-Four (ISBN: 978-0-141-03614-4) and Animal Farm (ISBN 978-0-141-03613-7) are re-issued on July 3rd.

Buy the pair on Amazon here.

PS I’m offering a pair of these Orwells to the first comment that correctly points out the (ahem) deliberate mistake I made on one of the new covers.

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A word about words

Words. So easy to take for granted.

If you live wherever people gather, words are mostly everywhere you look. But how often do we ponder just exactly what they’re doing – not saying, but actually doing?

Three weeks ago I had ample opportunity for word pondering. Against my – not-so, as it turns out – better judgment I was sent to the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank, which is located just outside Hebden Bridge – ‘lesbian capital of the North’ I was informed by at least two people – to spend five days with Dark Angels.

No. Dark Angels are nothing to do with James Cameron’s TV series about a bike courier in post-event Seattle. That’d be silly. In fact Dark Angels run a series of courses on creative writing in business. That’s pretty much all I knew when I headed up to Yorkshire on a wet Monday evening. Two trains and a very small bus later I trudged down a steep road to Lumb Bank, an eighteenth-century converted mill-owner’s house once owned by Ted Hughes. Over the course of the next few hours I was joined by our two tutors, John Simmons and Jamie Jauncey; Steve, who runs Lumb Bank; my five fellow participants Lyn, Julie, Molly, Sue and Marilyn; and Ted Hughes (the cat, female, a bit butch – surely a resident of nearby Hebden Bridge?).

For five days six complete strangers would have to cook, eat, light fires and generally live together while exploring and coming to terms with a number of – sometimes painful – things about themselves as writers. This wasn’t writing as therapy. It was therapy as writing.

Each morning, we’d gather in the converted barn and, with the chanting out the way – you might well laugh, but it aerates the blood and clears out last night’s cobwebs, never mind the bloody chakras – we’d get down to some serious writing exercises designed to get to the meat of ourselves as writers.

In no particular order – though I suspect the order we followed was crucial to the madness in John and Jamie’s method – we were asked to come up with the title and opening page of our autobiography; we had to write our version of the first paragraph of a published novel; we listened to music and wrote what we heard; we committed automatic writing and haiku to paper; we personalized Simon Armitage‘s Not the Furniture Game which is about Ted Hughes (not the cat, the other one); we formed an imaginary business, writing its founding story and its launch campaign. There were many other activities of a writing nature that I shan’t write about here for the sake of brevity.

In-between, while we scratched our heads over our daily homework activities, there were walks, a lunch with Simon Armitage – yes, him again, much wine, piano and guitar playing and singing (not by yours truly) and plenty of time – for me at least – to realise just how complacent I’d become as a copywriter after ten years.

Give me a book and I’ll slap a blurb on it in half an hour if need be. I pride myself on getting the job done quickly, pertinently and without fuss. I work on approximately two hundred titles a year so there’s no time for mucking about. Yet when I started at Penguin I’d be tinkering with each blurb for days trying to come up with the right formulation of words: a decent structure, pace, tension, a good stab at reflecting the author’s style. In short, putting together the most compelling proposition for our ideal reader standing in a bookshop.

Sure, I was green and was learning on the job. And with experience came all the tricks, the instant recognition of this or that requirement and, of course, a certain wisdom that speeds the process up. But wisdom too easily comes at the expense of wonder and fun. The words lose their excitement, playing with them becomes less of a joy. So you tend to experiment less and take fewer risks (if only because you know now that certain retailers and authors are – with very good reason – risk averse). In knowing the rules of the game you become bound by them. And that is never a good place to be.

My week with Dark Angels was about breaking down barriers inside myself. It was about how exciting words can be – not just what they say, but their sounds and patterns and effects, the rhythms and the sheer ruddy joy of playing around with them.

Words do so many things that we easily take for granted, and if ever we take words for granted we’re no longer seeing them properly. Worse, we’re no longer listening to them. So thank you, John and Jamie and Dark Angels, for bringing me back to the words.

And if you can’t spend a week with Dark Angels yourself? Then get hold of a decent volume of poetry. There you’ll surely be inspired by other writers, giddy with their own delight in words.

Isn’t that the most wonderful place to be?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Once Upon a time…

… in an office building on the Strand, we had an idea to make a story that was a game and a game that was a story. We called it We Tell Stories and tens of thousands of people looked at the site and wandered around St Pancras station and followed fictional characters on Twitter.

Well, the third story is now up and running and if you like your fairytales both personalizable
and dark you will enjoy this. Kevin Brooks, author of the brilliant Black Rabbit Summer, has constructed the building blocks for a traditional, yet melancholy fairytale. Putting them together is down to you. Go have a play and let us know what you think.

In other news, those wags at the BBC today announced the discovery of flying penguins. Of course we didn’t fall for this lame April Fool gag here at Penguin Towers. Everyone knows Penguins can’t fly.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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